4. The Village
The Village is around the time that most people started to lose faith in wunderkind M. Night Shyamalan, and it became clear that he favoured concocting stupid, gimmicky plot twists than denouements that actually make sense. The film was marketed as a creepy thriller set in the late 19th century, whereby the titular village lives in fear of a nameless gang of creatures residing in the woods, but true to form, Shyamalan screws it up with a series of absurd twists in act three. When protagonist Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) makes her way through the woods and is confronted by a
park ranger in a Land Rover, it's pretty clear that everything's taking place in the modern day. It turns out that Ivy's father, Edward (William Hurt) has been cultivating this hidden community for decades by paying off the government to keep planes from flying overhead, which pretty much derails what could have been a straight-up horror and all the better for it.